September 26, 2012 1:28am EDTSeptember 25, 2012 6:45pm EDTThe Angels spent big in the offseason, while the Dodgers added plenty of payroll over the summer. With both teams struggling to live up to expectations, LA could be without postseason baseball for the third straight season.

In and around Los Angeles, a place where attention can be swiped in the blink of an eye if something isn't interesting enough, if you don't live up to expectations, it's considered a serious disappointment.

It doesn't matter if it's a blockbuster movie, a restaurant with plenty of stars in its reviews or a baseball team with shiny new parts. If they can't provide the promised results people are bound to brush them aside and move on to the next thing. The Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels are on the verge of having that happen to them since they have not lived up to the advertising on their marquees.

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Their expectations might have come at different times -- the Angels were first to have them over the winter and the Dodgers followed with a mid-summer trading spree-- but that doesn't matter. They were placed upon both teams for good reasons, and with a week to go in the regular season, neither team looks like they are going to satisfy the area's appetite for winning as their seasons aren't expected to extend into the postseason.

The Angels are the bigger disappointment here. After two consecutive seasons without a playoff appearance, owner Arte Moreno went and got himself a brand new general manager and instructed him to make this team better. It seemed like Jerry Dipoto overpaid to do that in December when he signed Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson. Those contracts were enormous -- $317.5 million in total -- but both players added to the Angels' World Series hopes, and understandably so as they were the two biggest prizes in the free-agent market.

Pujols was the masher who was supposed to lift the lineup so the pitching wouldn't be the team's only weapon. Wilson was the left arm who was supposed to push the starting rotation from strong to great. However, at one point or another this season, both players have had serious dips in production and been examples of the inconsistency that has plagued the team all year. The Angels are all but eliminated from winning the American League West and are two games out of the second wild card spot.

"We are still in it. We can still make the playoffs, so I can't say it's a disappointment at this point," Dipoto said. "We are a couple games out with two series to play, so I feel like we can control our own fate."

The reason the Angels are even considering that this season could be a disappointment is because of their up and down ways. They started the season 6-14, the worst 20-game stretch to start a year in franchise history, and Pujols hit .194/.237/.269 with no home runs and five RBI's through the season's first 27 games.

The Angels eventually teased fans in Orange County by going 30-13 from late May until the All-Star break. They also won 15 of 18 before losing three of four to the Oakland A's, the team they are chasing for the second wild card, in mid-September. But since Sept. 10, they are 8-6and Wilson has been a big part of the problem, going 3-3 with an awful 6.28 ERA in his last 10 starts.

Obviously, there have been other problems beyond those two first-year additions, but those two are the reasons the Angels strutted into this season with massive expectations. The Angels weren't supposed to be clawing to stay alive in the race for the second wild card spot. They were supposed to be plotting their World Series parade route.

That seems so far off at this point that there have been several reports stating the Angels are considering a managerial change, which would mean ousting Mike Scioscia, the game's longest tenured manager, even though his current contract runs through 2018. Owner Arte Moreno, who is said to be livid over the team's current position, came out last week and told MLB.com that Scioscia isn't going anywhere and neither is Dipoto, who has clashed with the manager from time to time dating back to spring training, sources say.

With everyone's job secure (for now), the Angels need to win. If they don't and the basement-budget A's make the playoffs, the Angels will be the biggest disappointment in the sport because injuries or trades didn't derail their championship aspirations. Their play would have.

As for the Dodgers, they weren't expected to contend after barely finishing above .500 last season. In fact, some pundits even believed they could be a 90-loss team. From looking at some of the names the team used to catapult itself atop the division early, it wouldn't have been a complete surprise if that happened.

The organization was mired in a brutal ownership situation that tanked the team's chance to win anything the previous two seasons. During spring training, the only bright spots seemed to be Clayton Kershaw going after a second straight Cy Young award and Matt Kemp going after the MVP award, a year after finishing second. But they bucked their low-flying expectations and stormed to a 30-13 record by late May and held a seven-game lead in the National League West.

By that time, Frank McCourt was out as owner and Guggenheim Baseball Management had taken over and vowed to do whatever it took to return the franchise to glory. They didn't go back on that word, giving general manager Ned Colletti the green light to pull off blockbuster trade after blockbuster trade. The Dodgers acquired Hanley Ramirez, Shane Victorino, Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford, among others, during the second half of the season, signaling a new day and attitude at Dodger Stadium.

Those moves proved the ownership group was serious about winning and spending as they cranked expectations to 10. No longer was this team content with competing. The goal was to bury everyone and win a World Series.

Since the Dodgers pulled off their monumental trade with the Boston Red Sox, taking on more than $260 million in payroll, they have gone 11-17. The offense that was supposed to be bolstered by the moves is averaging barely over three runs per game.

The Dodgers are a storied franchise on the brink of major disappointment as they trail the St. Louis Cardinals for the NL's second wild card by 4 1/2 games. It may come to be that they spend most of October where everyone expected them to be at the start of the season, at home watching the postseason. That certainly is not where their evolved expectations during the summer had them.

Together, the Angels and Dodgers have done their best to shrink in the Los Angeles-area spotlight, forcing fans to stop believing and, if things continue this way for the next week, move their attention elsewhere in disappointment.